China is retaliating against South Korea's missile-defense system by taking aim at Korean dramas

By Echo Huang

China’s not one to sit by idly when it feels it’s been wronged.
So when South Korea agreed to let the US implement a missile-defense shield in the country, China appeared to respond by restricting Korean pop culture in the mainland. 

This crackdown on Korean dramas and pop music may have started as early as August, but South Korea only publicly commented on the matter two days ago (Nov. 28).
Up until recently, most of the news pertaining to China’s tightening of Korean culture had come from South Korea’s state-run Yonhap News Agency. 

Reports say China has turned down Korean stars’ applications to perform in the country and that it has not let any Korean movies screen in the mainland (link in Chinese) this year. 

China has been the one of largest markets for Korean pop culture (link in Chinese) in the last decade, investing $275 million in Korean publications and broadcasting in 2015 alone.
China, for its part, maintains it’s unaware of such restrictions. 

“I have never heard about any restriction on the Republic of Korea,” said China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang in a press conference on Nov. 21. 

While Geng denied the tightening was an official move responding to the missile-defense system, he said “the Chinese public has voiced their dissatisfaction as well.”
Not all are buying it. 

On the social media platform Weibo, one commenter said (link in Chinese): “Honestly, I really love Korean entertainment shows, but there is no idol when it comes to China’s sovereignty matter, everything could be gone in a blink of an eye.”
The drama started in October when South Korea (link in Chinese) noticed that none of its stars had obtained Beijing’s permission to perform in the country that month. 

In contrast, nine performances by Korean stars were approved from July to September.
Then, in November, Japanese bank Nomura told the Financial Times that Chinese authorities seemed to have banned (paywall) broadcasting of TV programs and advertising featuring Korean artists and brands.
A Chinese company was also penalized 100,000 yuan ($14,500) this month (link in Chinese) for trying to promote a K-pop performance by a South Korean group without government approval, according to Nov. 22 report by Yonhap.
The latest showdown will happen on Friday (Dec. 2), when CJ E&M, one of South Korea’s biggest entertainment firms, will host its biggest music festival in Hong Kong. 

It’s still unclear if the show will air in the mainland.

Axis of Evil

Michael Flynn, a Top Trump Adviser, Ties China and North Korea to Jihadists
By EDWARD WONG

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the choice of President-elect Donald J. Trump for national security adviser, speaking at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.

What if someone were to tell you that China and North Korea are allied with militant Islamists bent on imposing their religious ideology worldwide?
You might not agree. 

After all, China and North Korea are officially secular Communist states, and China has blamed religious extremists for violence in Muslim areas of its Xinjiang region.
But such an alliance is the framework through which retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the pick of President Donald J. Trump for national security adviser, views the two East Asian countries. 

To the list of pro-jihadist anti-Western conspirators, General Flynn adds Russia, Cuba and Venezuela, among others. (Never mind that he has recently had close financial and lobbying relationships with conservative Russian and Turkish interests.)
By appointing General Flynn, Mr. Trump has signaled that he intends to prioritize policy on the Middle East and jihadist groups, though the Obama administration seems to have stressed to Mr. Trump the urgency of dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program. 

General Flynn is an outspoken critic of political Islam and has advocated a global campaign led by the United States against “radical Islam.” 

He once posted on Twitter that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”
General Flynn is about to take on what many consider the most important foreign policy job in the United States government. 

He is expected to coordinate policy-making agencies, manage competing voices and act as Mr. Trump’s main adviser, and perhaps arbiter, on foreign policy.
General Flynn’s peers in the Army have praised him for his work gathering intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But senior officials have criticized him for being a poor manager as director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. 

After being forced from the job in 2014, he began denouncing the Obama administration in public, saying the White House refused to acknowledge important intelligence on growing jihadist threats and their ideological foundations.
He then wrote a book, with a co-author, on his military career and the need to intensify the campaign against Islamic extremists. 

The book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” published in July, is one of the few places where General Flynn has discussed his views on China and North Korea. 

The mentions are infrequent, but they give some clue as to how he views the Asian nations.
Here are the most relevant passages. 

In the introduction, General Flynn says one of his goals in writing the book is: “to show you the war being waged against us. 

This administration has forbidden us to describe our enemies properly and clearly: They are Radical Islamists. 

They are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel. 

Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela.”
He tries to further explain that alliance through a vague mention of a common ideology:
“There are many similarities between these dangerous and vicious radicals and the totalitarian movements of the last century. 

No surprise that we are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing. 

Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told.”
Early in his career, General Flynn served with the 25th Infantry Division in the Asia-Pacific region. He writes: “This opened up my eyes to the type of enemies we saw across a wide swath of the Asia-Pacific rim. 

There were many, and still are.”
General Flynn also gives a bit more detail on how he sees this global alliance:
“The war is on. 

We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. 

We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and countless other terrorist groups. (I will discuss later on, the close working relationships between terror groups and organized criminal organizations.) 

Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists, and garden-variety tyrants.
“This alliance surprises a lot of people. 

On the surface, it seems incoherent. 

How, they ask, can a Communist regime like North Korea embrace a radical Islamist regime like Iran?”
General Flynn goes on to discuss reports that North Korea has cooperated with Iran and Syria on nuclear programs and trade. 

He asserts that Iran is the “linchpin” of the global anti-Western network. 

He writes: “The mullahs have already established strategic alliances in our own hemisphere with Cuba and Venezuela, and are working closely with Russia and China; a victory over the ‘Great Satan’ in Iraq will compel the smaller Middle Eastern countries to come to terms with Tehran, and make the region much more inhospitable to us and our friends and allies.”
Finally, General Flynn writes that if the United States loses the global war, one result will be living under “the grim censorship we see in groups such as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban or from nations like Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.”

John Delury, a scholar of Chinese history and the Koreas at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, shared these thoughts after reading General Flynn’s book:
“General Flynn seems to be all about one thing — fighting ‘radical Islam’ — and that means Asia goes on the back burner. 

Obama was trying to ‘pivot’ from costly wars in the Middle East to economic opportunity in Asia, a strategy that was still in-progress and that Hillary Clinton would have stuck with. 

But Flynn has no concept of the importance of Asia. 

For him, America needs to become single-minded in the top priority — destroying radical Islam, at home and abroad.
“Flynn’s obsession with eliminating radical Islam is likely to color his view of everything else — including key strategic questions facing East Asia like the rise of China, resurgence of Japan and nuclear breakout of North Korea. 

Running the National Security Council is all about juggling priorities, keeping your eye on the ball while maintaining strategic balance. Flynn doesn’t come across as much of a juggler. 

For him, there is only one ball out there.
“If Flynn is able to press his global war on radical Islam, America’s rivals in Asia will seize the opportunity to further their interests. 

China can speed up its march to displace the U.S. as the architect of Asian security. 

North Korea can finish its drive to joining the nuclear club. 

Life will also change for America’s Asian allies, who will no longer be able to count on U.S. commitment to their development and defense. 

And America’s role as a promoter of human rights and liberal values — a contested and problematic mission, albeit a noble one — could become a thing of the past.
“Here’s an example of how Flynn’s global war on radical Islam could have unanticipated side effects on Asian security. 

In his book, Flynn links North Korea to his ‘enemy number one,’ the Islamists, by citing Pyongyang’s military and economic ties to Syria and Iran. 

Well, what if the North Koreans promised an envoy from Trump — who said he’s willing to talk to Kim Jong-un — that they would cut their links to radical Islam and even give the Americans some intel based on their years of cooperation? 

Nonproliferation guarantees, which the North Koreans put out as bait throughout the Obama years, to no effect, could serve as a starting point for resumed U.S.-D.P.R.K. negotiation under a Flynn foreign policy. 

The old dictum stands — my enemy’s enemy is my friend. 

Flynn is crystal clear who the enemy is, radical Islam. 

Anyone who shows eagerness to fight the Islamists buys a seat at Flynn’s national security table.”

Sick men of Asia

Study: China's sperm is getting worse
By Yuan Yang and Hudson Lockett

Beijing’s efforts to reinvigorate China’s birth rate, one of the lowest in the world, face a serious obstacle as semen quality plummets among young male donors, research suggests.
Last year fewer than a fifth of young men who donated sperm in the inland province of Hunan had sufficiently healthy semen to qualify as a donor, according to a 15-year study of more than 30,000 applicants. 

In 2001 more than half qualified.
Local media reports indicate Hunan is not the only province suffering a shortage in qualified donors. State broadcaster China Radio International recently reported that a sperm bank in Henan province had dropped minimum height and education requirements for donors and was offering to store their semen free of charge for three decades in an effort to make up its own deficit.
“Growing evidence seems to suggest that male infertility is increasingly becoming a serious concern in the entire country,” said Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. 

If shown to reflect a broader trend, such findings would further complicate China’s mounting demographic problems.
China’s fertility rate — the number of children a woman is expected to have during her child-bearing years — was 1.05 last year, according to data from the Chinese government’s annual “1 per cent” population survey, which polls about 17m citizens each year.
The bottom territories in a World Bank 2014 survey — South Korea, Portugal, Hong Kong and Macau — had fertility rates of 1.2, against a global average of 2.5. 

That survey estimated China’s fertility at 1.6, still far below the 2.1 births per woman needed to keep a country’s population from shrinking.
China is ageing rapidly, leading to a shortage of young workers and warnings of a pensions crisis, but its fertility rate has long been in decline. 

From a peak of 6.4 births per woman in 1965 it had fallen to 2.8 by 1979, the year the notorious one-child policy was introduced amid fears of runaway population growth. 

That regime led to widespread sex-selective abortion, resulting in a significantly skewed sex ratio.
The blanket policy was scrapped late last year for a two-child policy. 

But previous loosening of the old policy has fallen short of policymakers’ hopes in raising the country’s birth rate, with many Chinese couples apparently unwilling to take advantage of the chance to have a second child.
“The situation is probably worse than expected,” said Mr Huang, noting that the results of a government-commissioned national study on infertility in China that had been scheduled to end in 2011 had still not been made public. 

Some researchers also say previous census results have been manipulated by family planning officials in regions with a pro-birth policy, who inflate birth rates in order to make their policies look more effective.
The researchers in the Hunan semen study, published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility, say there is no clear explanation for why donors’ reproductive health declined so rapidly. 

But they point to “increased environmental pollution, including pollution of water, air and food”, as a possible explanation.
However, World Health Organisation spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said the WHO could not yet determine with certainty which factors had caused deterioration in certain or multiple countries, as studies often employed different methodologies to analyse semen. 

He also cautioned that semen quality did not necessarily correlate directly with male fertility.
“It should be noted that male reproductive health can be affected by many complex factors,” including lifestyle, the environment and concomitant diseases, he said. 

“More research is needed to enable sound guidance or policy advice concerning deteriorating semen quality.”

How Congress Can Help a Chinese Dissident

Honor Liu Xiaobo—a Nobel winner—with a street sign in front of China’s Embassy.
By JARED GENSER

In the waning days of the current Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan has an opportunity to send a message to Beijing about the value Americans place on human rights. 

He can bring to the floor for a vote a bill adopted unanimously in the Senate to rename the street in front of the Chinese Embassy for Liu Xiaobo, China’s jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Mr. Liu was arrested in December 2008 after penning a series of essays and participating in the drafting of a pro-democracy manifesto known as Charter 08. 

The government held him in solitary confinement without charge or access to legal counsel before ultimately sentencing him to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion.”

The dissident in April 2008.

Shortly after Mr. Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, his wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest. 

She has been held in her apartment in Beijing without charge or trial for more than five years. 

A guard is posted outside her door 24 hours a day.
When Chinese dissidents organize and challenge the one-party system, Beijing responds with an iron fist, imprisoning and torturing those who dare to speak out. 

Chinese authorities highlight Liu Xiaobo’s case to many of these troublemakers, pointing out that the world won’t help even Nobelist Liu Xiaobo.
Obama has raised Mr. Liu’s case publicly just twice. 

But neither he nor anyone from the White House has publicly mentioned Liu Xia’s name let alone challenged China’s claim that she is free. 

If Obama has made any private efforts on behalf of the Lius, they have had no discernible effect.
In February the Senate adopted a bill to rename the street in front of the Chinese Embassy. 

This legislation followed the bipartisan tradition of a bill adopted by Congress in 1984 and signed into law by President Reagan renaming the street in front of the Soviet Embassy for dissident Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
Speaking after the Senate action, State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner indicated that the president would veto the bill if it reaches his desk. 

“We view this kind of legislative action as something that only complicates our efforts, so we oppose this approach,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, agrees with the administration and is blocking the bill from being considered in his committee. 

Speaker Ryan has the authority to move the bill to an immediate vote on the House floor, where it would likely pass by a bipartisan, veto-proof majority.
Surely the United States should celebrate the courage of individuals who stand up to authoritarian regimes. 

If Obama wants to veto this bill and stand with China against his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, then let that be his legacy on human rights.

China paper says Singapore troop carriers should be "melted down"

Reuters

Armored vehicles belonging to the Singapore military seen covered with tarpaulin in Hong Kong.
Armoured troop carriers belonging to Singapore and currently impounded in Hong Kong should be "melted down", China's influential state-run tabloid the Global Times said on Tuesday, in its second swipe at the island nation in two days.
The nine troop carriers were impounded in Hong Kong last week en route back from Taiwan, sparking a rebuke to Singapore from China about maintaining military ties with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province.
Ties between China and Singapore have been strained in recent months, particularly over the disputed South China Sea, where Beijing, which claims most of the waters, suspects Singapore of siding with the United States.
Beijing has accused Washington of deliberately creating tension by sailing its ships close to China's islands.
The Global Times, published by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, blasted Singapore's "carelessness" with the armoured vehicles, which it said reflected a failure to take seriously China's displeasure over its military relationship with Taiwan.
"Singapore's image in China is now so rotten that ordinary Chinese people think the best thing to do with the 'confiscated' armoured vehicles that 'walked right into our trap' is to send them to the steel mills to be melted down," it said.
The editorial, published in the paper's Chinese language edition, whose website attracts millions of visitors every day, adopts a similarly strident tone to a Monday commentary in its much less read English edition, accusing Singapore of "hypocrisy".
Singapore should use this "interlude" in its relations with China to find "enlightenment" rather than to provoke more resentment, it added.
"All incidents have causes -- to grasp and understand them is always wise," the editorial said.
Singapore and Taiwan have a longstanding military relationship that began in the 1970s and involves Taiwan being used as grounds for Singaporean infantry training.
Beijing has grudgingly tolerated this agreement since the China and Singapore re-established diplomatic relations in the 1990s.
The Global Times has a history of writing hyperbolic editorials.
In September, the paper embarked on a war of words with Singapore's ambassador to China, Stanley Loh, over a report that said Singapore had raised the South China Sea at summit in Venezuela, which the ambassador denied.
China has repeatedly warned Singapore against getting involved in the territorial dispute in which China asserts sovereignty over waters and islands claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
Singapore has no claims, but as the biggest port in Southeast Asia, the city-state's open economy depends on continued free navigation in the area.

Facebook Must Stay Out of China

A Faustian pact with Beijing would almost certainly make user behavior around the world visible to Chinese state security.
BY CLAY SHIRKY, ANDREW MCLAUGHLIN, KAISER KUO

Facebook has reportedly developed software to suppress posts from users’ feeds in targeted geographic areas, a feature created to help the giant social media network gain access to China, where it is blocked. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long been courting China’s leaders, studying Mandarin, and talking with Chinese internet executives. 

How far should he and his company go in order to grow? 

And at what expense? 

—The ChinaFile Editors

Clay Shirky, global network professor, New York University’s Shanghai campus:
Facebook shouldn’t do this. 

Although the tool, as described, copies some industry norms — Facebook would suppress messages inside China but show them outside — it comes nowhere near what Beijing would demand for re-entry. 

At the same time, those additional conditions would make any deal not worth the cost, either ethical or financial.
Though the U.S. press often writes as if the principal goal of Chinese censorship is blocking information from the United States, the Chinese Communist Party is far more worried about its own citizens. 

This is why seemingly innocuous platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr are blocked; it isn’t what U.S. teenagers would post that worries the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, and those concerns would shape any Facebook deal as well.
Hiding selected posts from outside China would not meet the bare minimum of Beijing’s requirements for citizen surveillance. 

Facebook would have to keep data on those users on servers in Beijing and grant the government direct access. 

Offending posts by Chinese users would have to be suppressed worldwide, not just in China. (Users in Anqing would not be allowed to share posts about corruption with students in Ann Arbor.)
That’s just the geographic controls.
Beijing would demand that censorship follow Chinese citizens internationally.

They do something like this today with SIM cards, which include data headers that identify country of origin. 

Chinese SIMs are subjected to Chinese censorship, whether the user is in Dalian or Dusseldorf. (This is why Chinese mobile plans have such advantageous international rates; cheap roaming means users often don’t bother to get local SIM cards, allowing censorship to follow them worldwide.)
And the situation is not static. 

Under the bland banner of “stability maintenance,” social media regulations have been coordinated, onerous, and monotonically restrictive. 

The chop would not be dry on any contract with Facebook before it had to be renegotiated.
Against these costs, the chance that Facebook would be allowed to succeed in China is zero. 

As tech blogger Ben Thompson wrote about the ride-hailing service Uber’s failure in the country, “I’ve simply seen no way that the government tolerates foreign ownership of something as foundational as transportation infrastructure.” 

That is true of media as well, especially media Chinese citizens use to communicate and coordinate with one another.
Two decades after the ICQ messaging service launched, there is not one example of foreign social media succeeding there — not Google, not Instagram, not WhatsApp, not Twitter. 

The closest example, LinkedIn, is a business service with no threat of wide adoption and has roughly the same number of users in China and the U.K., a market 5 percent its size. 

Even Apple, selling a luxury product whose software cannot be separated from its hardware, has not been able to maintain its online services — China blocks iTunes, iBooks, and News.
The ruling Communist Party appears convinced — correctly, in my view — that freedom of speech and assembly threaten single-party rule. 

In addition, censorship is a good source of mercantile protection. 

The idea that politics differs from economics does not resonate strongly in Beijing; the ability to provide a competitive advantage to local firms is a political tool, offering the very entrepreneurs who might push for global connectivity the consolation prize of the largest market in the world.
I understand why Facebook wants this. 

It has traded as a growth stock since 2012, but user acquisition is slowing. 

Access to China would allow it to postpone that reckoning by a few years. 

But any Chinese presence would be token, negotiated more to reduce an irritant than to allow real access. 

The “some conversation is better than no conversation” argument Facebook has been making for years now simply wouldn’t hold up under the terms demanded by the party.

Andrew McLaughlin, technology executive:
Though it has been evident for years that Mark Zuckerberg really, really wants Facebook to operate in China, I’m genuinely surprised that the company appears, finally, to have made the decision to do it.
I’m surprised for two big reasons:
First, Facebook will have to facilitate Chinese spying on non-Chinese users. 

To operate in China, Facebook will have to comply not only with the party’s onerous censorship demands but also with its user surveillance requirements. 

Through a multi-layered latticework of necessary operating licenses, the Chinese authorities require social networks and providers of messaging services — Facebook is both — to be willing and able to turn over user data, including account details and the contents of posts and private communications.
Doing the bidding of China’s state security apparatus will put Facebook in a position of collaboration that goes far beyond what any prominent U.S. tech company has agreed to. 

The contrast with Google is instructive. 

In 2006, Google entered China as a search engine — an “internet content provider,” in the taxonomy of Chinese regulators — but deliberately excluded from its China-licensed sites any services that entailed individual user data or private communications. 

In that way, Google subjected its China-directed search engine to censorship requirements but avoided any obligation to comply with surveillance requests from a government prone to human rights violations. (Beyond an abstract revulsion at the prospect of assisting political persecution, we had watched with horror the imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao after Yahoo’s Hong Kong subsidiary handed over to Beijing the contents of his email account.)
But that’s not even the worst of it. 

The very nature of a social network means that updates and communications written by non-Chinese users will become visible to Chinese security services.

A Facebook user’s newsfeed is the set of updates and shares posted by her/his friends, including many written by friends of friends. 

If a non-Chinese user has a Chinese friend — or, given how Facebook works, even a Chinese friend of a non-Chinese friend — anything that non-Chinese user posts to Facebook could be read by Chinese state security. 

Likewise, if a Chinese user likes or comments on a post by a non-Chinese user, that entire thread becomes attached to the Chinese user’s account and thus subject to Chinese governmental examination.
Because of the permeable, fluid, and semi-public sharing dynamics inherent to Facebook, I can think of no technical or policy means by which the company’s Chinese subsidiary could shield non-Chinese users’ posts, comments, likes, and shares from disclosure to Chinese state security.
Second, there is little chance Facebook can actually succeed in China. 

Even if the Chinese government would permit a foreign tech company to win in a space as important as social networking (and past experience strongly indicates it will not), Chinese users have exhibited strong disinterest in local Facebook knockoffs, and there is little reason to think a foreign player will fare any better.
From eBay to Amazon to Google to Uber, the Chinese government’s initial red-carpet welcomes to Silicon Valley companies have invariably morphed into grinding wars of attrition in which local competitors collude with officials and regulators to ensure the foreigners’ long-term market failure. 

Plus, Facebook will have to surrender a large degree of control over its Chinese service to whatever local partner ends up owning 51 percent of the licensed Chinese entity, as required by Chinese law. 

The experiences of other Silicon Valley entrants indicate that those kinds of joint ventures most often end in frustration and acrimony. (It’s plausible, but too early to conclude, that LinkedIn will prove the exception to that rule.)
I’m surprised, in short, that Facebook would risk sparking outrage and reputational damage among its non-Chinese users (for crossing a line of collaboration that would render their posts, comments, likes, shares, and private messages vulnerable to Chinese government spying) in order to take a crack at a market in which it’s highly unlikely to succeed.

Kaiser Kuo, host, The Sinica Podcast:
Given China’s increasingly strict internet censorship, it should surprise no one that any re-entry by Facebook would be conditional not only on the company’s acquiescing to censorship but also on its demonstrating the ability to carry it out to Beijing’s satisfaction. 

Equally if not even more troubling would be the requirement, all but inevitable, that Facebook store Chinese user data on servers in China, making that data accessible to Chinese courts and law enforcement. 

Even if Beijing deigns to allow Facebook a presence in China, Facebook will face a firestorm of criticism from human rights and data privacy activists.
It will defend its decision by invoking the same logic that U.S. proponents of engagement have always deployed. 

Some connectivity is surely better than none, which is essentially what Facebook has today: a tiny, inconsequential handful of China’s more than 700 million internet users are regular users of platforms like Facebook or Twitter. 

Facebook probably won’t make its case by suggesting that connecting China will bring about political change; it was, after all, suspicion of that sort of thing that got it blocked in the first place. 

It may instead point to the inherent good in connectedness and note the evil — mistrust and misunderstanding — that arises in its absence. 

All this justifies compromise.
Google faced a similar dilemma when it decided to enter China in early 2006. 

But the moral calculus has shifted in the intervening decade. 

Google may have been viewed with suspicion even then, but now — after various Color Revolutions and Arab Spring uprisings with the names of U.S. internet properties conveniently appended to them by the U.S. media — Beijing will exact far greater compromise. 

China blocks far more foreign websites, and blocks them more aggressively, than it did then. 

Chinese users have excellent alternatives: social media platforms where their friends already are. 

They aren’t clamoring for Facebook, and those who want it have little trouble hopping the Great Firewall to get to it: Nationalists bent on trolling pro-independence Taiwanese celebs hopped the wall in droves this past summer, after all. 

So Facebook has little leverage to speak of; it will play by Beijing’s rules or not at all.
Indeed, Facebook’s only real card is the public relations value to Beijing of letting the company in: “See? All that nonsense about censorship was clearly overblown.”

But it’s not. 

One of the regrettable effects of our use of the “Great Firewall” as a metonym for Chinese internet censorship is that too many people equate censorship with the blocking of sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. 

In fact, the censorship of domestic Chinese sites is far more onerous and impacts a far greater number of users. 

That won’t change with a Facebook entry.
Whatever your posture toward Facebook for its willingness to compromise on freedom of expression in the name of engagement and greater global connectivity, the unblocking of Facebook to users in the People’s Republic of China, should it come to pass, must not be construed in any way as a loosening of censorship.

China’s New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything

Beijing wants to give every citizen a score based on behavior such as spending habits, turnstile violations and filial piety, which can blacklist citizens from loans, jobs, air travel.

By JOSH CHIN and GILLIAN WONG

HANGZHOU, China—Swiping her son’s half-fare student card through the turnstile here one Monday afternoon, Chen Li earned herself a $6 fine and a reprimand from a subway-station inspector for not paying the adult fare.
A notice on a post nearby suggested more-dire consequences.
It warned that infractors could be docked points in the city’s “personal credit information system.”
A decline in Ms. Chen’s credit score, according to official pronouncements, could affect her daily life, including securing loans, jobs and her son’s school admission.
“I’m sure if it comes up, I can explain,“ Ms. Chen said, saying she picked up the card accidentally.
“It was unintentional.”
Hangzhou’s local government is piloting a “social credit” system the Communist Party has said it wants to roll out nationwide by 2020, a digital reboot of the methods of social control the regime uses to avert threats to its legitimacy.
More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness.
A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules.
The effort echoes the dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on urban workers’ behavior.
In time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according to interviews with some architects of the system and a review of government documents.
Algorithms would use a range of data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, or faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels.


The endeavor reinforces Xi Jinping’s campaign to tighten his grip on the country and dictate morality at a time of economic uncertainty that threatens to undermine the party.
Xi in October called for innovation in “social governance” that would “heighten the capacity to forecast and prevent all manner of risks.”
The national social-credit system’s aim, according to a slogan repeated in planning documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Thus far, the pilot data-collecting systems aren’t yet tied together into what Beijing envisions as a sweeping system, which would assign each citizen a rating.
It isn’t clear that Ms. Chen’s ticket infraction made it into any central system, although the notice warned that fare-dodgers risked being marked down starting Jan. 1; a station agent said only repeat offenders are reported.

Some Shanghai districts such as this one are rolling out early versions of a ‘social credit’ program that aims to rank citizens based on various behaviors.

Zan Aizong, a Hangzhou human-rights activist, sees the system, once it’s fully operational, as an Orwellian exercise to keep closer tabs on a populace already lacking basic liberties such as freedom of speech.
“Tracking everyone that way,” Mr. Zan said, “it’s just like ‘1984.’ ”

Blacklisted
China’s judiciary already has already created a blacklisting system that would tie into the national social-credit operation.
Zhuang Daohe, a Hangzhou legal scholar, cites the example of a client, part-owner of a travel company, who now can’t buy tickets for planes or high-speed trains because a Hangzhou court put him on a blacklist after he lost a dispute with a landlord.
“This has had a huge impact on the business,” said the client’s wife. “He can’t travel with clients anymore.”
Added Mr. Zhuang: “What happens when it punishes the wrong person?”
Hangzhou officials didn’t respond to inquiries.
Another government system blacklists badly behaved tourists.
Driving the social-credit system are the State Council—China’s cabinet—and the central national-planning agency.
A blueprint the cabinet published in 2014 stated it aimed to “build sincerity” in economic, social and political activity.
It stressed the need for fair and clean government and for punishing polluting factories and bribe-takers.
Blacklists will expose offenders and restrict them from certain activities, while well-behaved citizens will earn access to “green lanes” that provide faster government services, the blueprint said.
Citizens in jobs deemed sensitive—lawyers, accountants, teachers, journalists—will be subject to enhanced scrutiny, it said.

Flags promote a 'Sincerity Management Model Street' in a cafe in Shanghai, where ‘sincerity displays’ at some restaurants show video feeds from kitchens.

The State Council and national-planning agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.
China’s government must overcome technological and bureaucratic obstacles to build a system that can monitor 1.4 billion people.
Government departments often guard their information, undermining efforts to build a unified database, and their systems often aren’t compatible, said Meng Tianguang, a political scientist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University who advises the government on applying “big data” to governance issues but isn’t directly involved in the social-credit system.
“Whether we can actually pull this off, we’re in a state of uncertainty at the moment,” Mr. Meng said. “Either way, it’s better than the traditional era,” until recently, he said, “when we had no data and policy was based on the judgment of individuals.”
The Shanghai government on an official website has identified scores of violations that can incur credit penalties in its pilot system, including falling behind on bills and breaking traffic rules.
State-media reports list penalties for not being filial to one’s parents. (Under Chinese law, parents over 60 may sue children for not visiting regularly or not ensuring they have enough food.)
Penalties for low scorers will include higher barriers to obtaining loans and bans on indulgences such as luxury hotels, according to state-media reports.
The Shanghai system appears to still be in an early phase.
Residents can check their social-credit records, but records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal did’t show any nonfinancial data.
Shanghai city officials didn’t respond to inquiries.
Despite official-media warnings and propaganda promoting sincerity, dozens of people interviewed in Shanghai weren’t aware of the social-credit plan.
Many agreed more should be done to enforce higher moral standards, bemoaning habits such as spitting, cutting in line and being cold to strangers in need.
Research by Yang Wang, a Syracuse University expert on internet behavior, has shown Chinese internet users, accustomed to the idea of government snooping, are less concerned with online privacy than Americans.
The most common word for privacy, yinsi, didn’t appear in popular Chinese dictionaries until the mid-1990s, he notes.

Behavior reports
In the tree-lined Yangjing neighborhood, subdistrict authorities maintain a database that gives a hint as to what elements of a broader social-credit system might look like.
The database collects reports on locals’ behavior from residential committees, said Yuan Jianming, the head of the Yangjing Sincerity Construction Office.

Slogans promote sincerity along a Shanghai road.

Since mid-2015, the office has published a monthly “red list” of exemplary residents.
Zhu Shengjun, 28, a high-school teacher, was named on a September red list.
He said he didn’t know why.
While he supported efforts to encourage better behavior, he hesitated at the idea of linking that with financial consequences, saying “it seems like too much of a stretch.”
The office also maintains a “gray list” of people behaving badly—throwing garbage out of windows, say—but the office hasn’t decided whether to publicize it, Mr. Yuan said.
In an area with a population of roughly 170,000, only around 120 have made Yangjing’s red list. Officials there complained to Chinese media this year that limited data sharing between departments was hampering efforts to rate people.
Businesses, too, get surveillance in pilot cities, where anyone can look up records on registered companies, though the records are sometimes incomplete.
One objective: turning around what leaders see as a crippling lack of trust among citizens from decades of corruption and bare-knuckle competition.
So the social-credit system aims not just to collect data on individuals for official use, it seeks data on the behavior of businesses to analyze and show the results to consumers.
One example is food safety, a major issue since anger erupted over melamine-tainted milk powder that killed six infants in 2008.
Subsequent scandals, including the sale of waste oil scooped up from gutters for reuse in restaurants, have continued to fuel mistrust.
Yangjing officials offer a solution: touch-screen displays they installed this summer in some restaurants.
The screens, part of a local social-credit pilot system, offer an unusual level of transparency for China.
Lit up with slogans—“Join heart to hand, be a model of sincerity” reads one—they display information about where ingredients came from and when waste oil was last picked up.
Customers can watch videos on a mobile app showing chefs working, and the system displays the eatery’s health-department rating.

Diners eat near a restaurant 'sincerity display' showing a video feed from kitchen, health ratings and other information.

One recent Monday at Jujube Tree, a vegetarian restaurant, the food-safety console was partially obscured by poster board.
Manager Wang Dacheng said it was because the system had erroneously downgraded the restaurant’s health rating, and local officials couldn’t fix it.
“We have a lot of return customers. What if they come in and see that?” Mr. Wang said.
He said he supported the system but was wary of its being applied without better controls.
Yangjing officials didn't respond to inquiries.
For initial social-credit efforts, local officials are relying on information collected by government departments, such as court records and loan and tax data.
More-extensive logging of everyday habits, such as social-media use and online shopping, lies with China’s internet companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
A credit-scoring service by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services—one of eight companies approved to pilot commercial experiments with social-credit scoring—assigns ratings based on information such as when customers shop online, what they buy and what phone they use.
If users opt in, the score can also consider education levels and legal records.
Perks in the past for getting high marks have included express security screening at the Beijing airport, part of an Ant agreement with the airport.
“Especially for young people, your online behavior goes towards building up your online credit profile,” said Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, “and we want people to be aware of that so they know to behave themselves better.”
Alibaba shares aggregate data about online sales with China’s statistics bureau but doesn’t divulge personal data unless required to by law, for example in criminal investigations, Mr. Tsai said.
The local-government trials aren’t known to be tapping private-sector data, although the social-credit system blueprint designates internet data as a “strategic national resource” and calls for internet companies to contribute data, without getting into specifics.
Whether private and public data systems will be combined is still being hammered out, said Zhu Wei, a China University of Politics and Law scholar who has advised the government on social-credit efforts.
In an October speech screened to 1.5 million officials, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma urged law-enforcement agencies to use internet data as a tool to identify criminals, according to posts on a Communist Party social-media feed.
He didn’t mention sharing Alibaba’s user data.
His comments raised eyebrows for broaching the notion that internet companies share data with government agencies. 
Alibaba declined to make Ma available for comment.
“We believe the application of machine learning and data analytics for the purpose of crime prevention is consistent with our core values: solving society’s problems,” the company said.
In an interview Nov. 1 with state media, a deputy head of China’s central-planning agency, Lian Weiliang, noted that much of the government’s credit-related data were stuck on “isolated islands” and said a central data platform had been established to encourage information sharing.
He said the platform had collected 640 million pieces of credit information from 37 central-government departments and various local governments.
The agency said the government has stopped untrustworthy people, identified by the court system, from buying airline tickets 4.9 million times.
Some advisers to the government, such as Mr. Zhu and Mr. Meng, said they were skeptical the system would meet the 2020 deadline because of the immense task of integrating data and keeping information secure.
In Hangzhou, where Ms. Chen used her son’s pass, residents can check their social-credit records at a government-services center.
Records the Journal viewed showed only whether people had kept up with health-insurance and social-security payments—a far cry from the central government’s goals.

U.S. Chinese Fifth Column

Chinese government money backs buyout firm’s deal for U.S. chip maker
By Liana B. Baker, Koh Gui Qing and Julie Zhu | SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK/HONG KONG

Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a buyout fund that agreed to acquire U.S.-based chip maker Lattice Semiconductor Corp for $1.3 billion earlier this month, is funded partly by cash originating from China's central government and also has indirect links to its space program, Chinese corporate filings show.
Reuters, in a review of about a dozen filings from China's state-run corporate register, has established that the financial investment in Canyon Bridge originates from China’s State Council, the top decision-making body of the government.
This link could draw more U.S. regulatory scrutiny over the Lattice deal on concerns that technology gained through the purchase could be used by China's military, according to analysts who follow the chip industry and monitor foreign investment review decisions by the U.S. government.
"It is a red flag," James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of Canyon Bridge's links to the Chinese state.
"It's not a deal killer, but deals like this sometimes run into roadblocks."
Portland, Oregon-based Lattice makes programmable chips known as "field programmable gate arrays" that allow companies to put their own software on silicon chips for different uses.
It does not sell chips to the U.S. military, but its two biggest rivals -- Xilinx and Intel Corp’s Altera -- make chips that are used in military technology.
Shares in Lattice fell as much as 4.8 percent in early Monday trade, but had recouped losses by nearly midday to be down 2.7 percent.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a U.S. government body that conducts security reviews of proposed acquisitions by foreign firms, has yet to sign off on the agreement.
How CFIUS judges the potential military applications of Lattice’s programmable chips will help determine if the deal goes ahead or not, industry analysts and CFIUS experts say.
CFIUS declined to comment for this story.
The Lattice deal is one of the largest attempted by a Chinese-backed firm in the U.S. semiconductor sector. 
It is unclear if CFIUS will block the purchase, but a rejection would deal another blow to the Chinese, who have invested a record $200 billion in overseas acquisitions this year.
The United States, Germany and Australia have scuttled Chinese takeover bids in recent months due to concerns they may serve China's national security interests over their own.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Canyon Bridge was formed recently with Lattice being its first announced deal.
It describes itself as a "U.S.-based private equity buyout fund focused on providing strategic capital" to technology companies, according to its website.
It counts Ray Bingham, an executive chairman of Cypress Semiconductor Corp, chairman of Flex Ltd and an Oracle Corp board member, as one of its co-founders.
Bingham could not be reached for comment.
The only investor in Canyon Bridge is a unit of China Venture Capital Fund Co Ltd, according to a filing made by Lattice to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last Tuesday.
The China Venture Capital Fund is a unit of China Reform Holdings Corp, according to the website of China Reform Holdings. For a graphic, click tmsnrt.rs/2gegSQc


A Reuters review of Chinese corporate filings dated June 16 this year shows that China’s State Council is the only shareholder in Beijing-based China Reform Holdings. 
Reuters was unable to determine if China Reform Holdings has another source of financing.
China Reform Holdings, on its website, states the government holds the investment through the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), a special unit under the State Council responsible for supervising and managing the country's non-financial government-owned enterprises.
Reuters could not determine if the ownership structure has changed since the filing.
SASAC did not respond to a fax and telephone calls for comment.
Canyon Bridge and Lattice declined to comment for this story.
Canyon Bridge’s legal adviser on the Lattice bid, Jones Day, had said publicly that Canyon Bridge had "limited partners with funding coming predominately from the China Reform Fund."
Limited partners are investors in private equity funds.
China Reform Fund is a unit of China Reform Holdings.
China Reform Holdings declined to comment and China Venture Capital Fund could not be reached for a comment.
Jones Day declined further comment.
According to its 2014 annual report that was published last year, China Reform Holdings is positioned to "invest in strategic emerging industries related to national security and the lifeblood of the national economy."
Chinese corporate filings also show that China Reform Holdings is a shareholder in China Aerospace Investment Holdings Ltd. via a separate unit, Guoxin International Investment Corp Ltd.
Guoxin International, which was created in 2012 to help Chinese state-owned companies expand within China and abroad, could not be reached for comment.
China Aerospace Investment is the main investment manager of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), which develops and launches all Chinese rockets, satellites, manned spacecraft, and space stations as well as all strategic missiles and other weapons, according to CASC’s website.
China has been working to develop its space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes.
While indirect, those ties between China Reform Holdings, China Aerospace and a U.S. company that makes technology with potential military applications will likely get attention from U.S. regulators, according to CFIUS experts.
"It doesn't mean they won't get cleared, but they will get a harder look from CFIUS if the acquiring company is state backed than if it was a private backed company," said Paul Marquardt, an attorney with Cleary Gottlieb who specializes in CFIUS actions.
China Aerospace’s corporate filings and annual report did not detail the size of Guoxin International's stake in the firm, except to show that at the end of 2015 Guoxin was one of as many as 19 shareholders, and that it held a 20 percent stake.
A source close to the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record said that Lattice and Canyon Bridge would disclose all sources of Canyon Bridge's capital in filings with U.S. regulators.
The proxy statement on the proposed Lattice bid, which will have more details of the offer, has yet to be filed.

How Trump Will Win the Trade War with China

Beijing has not yet realized that lobbyists, even lobbyists for Blue Chip companies like Boeing and Apple, are not high on Trump’s list of favorite people. 

By STEVEN MOSHER

The American business press is filled with doomsday scenarios about the trade war that the President-elect is supposedly about to unleash on the world.

• “Trade War’s Biggest Loser—Stocks,” blared The Wall Street Journal on Friday, predicting falling stock prices if Trump follows through on trade.
• “A Trade War with China is Likely Under Donald Trump,” writes Minxin Pei in Fortune magazine, predicting that each countries exports to the other will “collapse,” and a “dangerous military confrontation” over the South China Sea or Taiwan may follow.
• “8 Reasons Why Starting a Trade War with China is a Bad Idea,” editorialized CNN, giving as reason number one the fear that China will “respond” in kind, and ending by arguing that the yuan is already “fairly valued,” a statement most economists would take issue with.

Most of these stories envision a vicious circle of tariffs and countertariffs – a kind of economic mutual assured destruction – that ends in a global recession.
The Smoot Hawley tariffs are invariably invoked, even though we now know that these did not cause the Great Depression.
A few imaginative souls have even speculated that lowering the boom on Chinese cheating will actually benefit China.
 Bloomberg, for example, published an article by Michael Schuman entitled, “Who Wins a Trade War? China.”
In the article, Schuman argues that any effort to level the trade playing field will only accelerate China’s effort to develop “national champions.”
These are the government-subsidized behemoths that Beijing imagines will one day soon be able to flood the American market with cheap smart phones, medical devices, and electric cars.
(Someone in the Chinese leadership ought to ask Japan’s mighty Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) how its enormously expensive effort to pick winners and losers over the decades has worked out. The answer: not very well.)
As the countdown to the inauguration continues, it is dawning on American business circles that President Trump is actually serious about stopping China’s cheating on trade.
Their nervousness over the prospect of a confrontation with one of America’s largest trading partners is real and growing.
Beijing, for its part, is doing everything it can to stoke their anxiety.
The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times has already started issuing threats, promising to retaliate if tariffs of 45% are imposed on Chinese-made goods.
“A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus,” the paper threatened on November 13th. “U.S. auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and U.S. soybean and maize imports will be halted.”
Apparently Beijing has not yet realized that lobbyists, even lobbyists for Blue Chip companies like Boeing and Apple, are not high on Trump’s list of favorite people. 
Nor have they grasped that the businessman does not respond well to threats.
Trump, on the other hand, understands perfectly well that the Chinese leadership does not merely cheat on trade: it is the biggest trade cheater in the history of man. 
He is under no illusions about the fact that Beijing is engaged in all-out economic warfare against the United States.
The numbers don’t lie.
The Chinese sold us $367 billion more stuff in 2015 than we sold them, $483 billion versus a paltry $116 billion.
The shipping containers from China arrive full and go back empty.
America’s trade deficit with China is spiraling out of control.
Trump advisor Peter Navarro has explained how China is cheating on trade, and it has nothing to do with a lack of American competitiveness.
Nor is it solely a matter of Beijing manipulating its currency.
Rather, Navarro says, Beijing engages in five unfair trading practices.
Besides manipulating its currency and providing illegal export subsidies, it engages in massive intellectual property theft, avoiding research and development costs.
Add to this lax worker safety standards—tens of thousands of Chinese workers are killed each year on the job—and environmental regulations that go unenforced.
Taken together, these unethical and illegal practices reduce the price of Chinese goods sold in American stores by 45%.
President-elect Trump has proposed a simple yet elegant solution to this inequity: he promises to impose a tariff of 45% on all Chinese-made goods coming into the United States.
My prediction is that China, recognizing that for the first time they are dealing with an American president who is serious about righting the trade imbalance, will come to the negotiating table before this happens.
First of all, China’s leaders know that, as President, Donald Trump will enjoy broad authority on trade matters.
He can, on his own authority and without consulting Congress, raise tariffs, impose quotas, and terminate trade agreements.
His promised renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada will be a further wake-up call for the Chinese, signaling that he is serious about righting the trade imbalance not just with American’s near neighbors, but with China as well.
Another reason to expect China’s leaders to blink is that their export-oriented economy is far more vulnerable than ours to a trade war.
According to the World Bank, 41.2% of China’s GDP comes from exports and imports.
The comparable figure for the U.S. is only 27%.
In fact, these numbers understate the risk to China’s economy.
For while the United States is China’s most important economic partner, the converse is not true.
Beijing desperately needs American consumers to keep buying massive amounts of Chinese-made goods, especially now.
China’s export sector is essentially stagnant, its factories suffer from overcapacity, and the country as a whole is running at a significant fiscal deficit.
The last thing the Chinese leadership wants is for their country’s already fragile economy to be disrupted by a trade war.
If China actively takes steps to avert a trade war with the United States, as I expect it will, it will not be the first time that Beijing has chosen negotiation over confrontation.
Beijing has a long history of resolving trade imbalances with its East Asian neighbor, Japan, in exactly this fashion.
When the balance of payments between the two countries skews in one direction or the other, trade officials from both countries sit down and draw up plans to bring trade back into balance.
Negotiations between American and China will necessarily be more complicated, not least by the enormity of the trade deficit in question, but can in principle be resolved the same way.
There is one final reason, less tangible perhaps, why I expect Xi Jinping to eschew retaliation in favor of negotiation.
He and the other members of the top echelon of the Chinese leadership live in a world defined not by rules but by interpersonal relationships.
It is a system where the strong are respected, while the weak are mercilessly crushed.
I believe that President Trump will, more than Obama, Bush, or Clinton, enjoy the respect of the CCP leadership.
After all, a strong-willed, no-nonsense, deal-maker is a type that Xi Jinping and his colleagues will instantly recognize.
In fact, Trump may well turn out to be precisely the right person to strike a bargain with China, saving American jobs and factories.
For the time being, expect China’s leaders to continue to bluster and bully, even as it becomes increasingly clear to them that their threats are having absolutely no effect on President-elect Trump. Then, just before Trump slaps them with tariffs—and serious damage is done to China’s economy–they will agree to sit down and negotiate a reasonable accommodation on matters of trade.

Chinese Aggressions

Vietnam Is Challenging China's Control Of The Disputed South China Sea

By Ralph Jennings

Leaders in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines take a pragmatic, work-with-me-please view toward China in easing Asia’s widest reaching sovereignty dispute. 

They all say the South China Sea, or some fragment of it, is theirs and their claims overlap. 

China has expanded quickly since 2010 to assert control over almost the entire 3.5 million-square-km (1.4 million-square-mile) sea, putting other countries on the defensive. 

But one other country is doing the same thing and China can neither ignore it nor neutralize it through economic and trade deals. (That’s what happens to other countries.) 

It’s almost China’s double. 

It’s Vietnam.
Vietnam is smaller than China and its military, ranked 17th by the database GlobalFirePower.com, lags China’s at No. 3. 

But otherwise the two are chasing maritime control in the same ways. 

Here are five:

Activists chant anti-China slogans as they hold posters reading ‘Gac Ma, our country will never forget’ during a rally in Hanoi on March 14, 2016, to mark the anniversary of a 1988 battle in the Spratly Islands, a rare act of protest over an issue that has come to dog relations between Hanoi and Beijing.

1. Both make historic claims. 

Beijing cites maps and documents going back to the Han Dynasty 2,200 years ago to substantiate its claim to the South China Sea. 

Vietnamese people were using the Spratly Islands, the sea’s biggest group of tiny land features, as long as 1,000 years ago, their story goes. 

Hanoi has also cited an 1887 Franco-Chinese Treaty as a basis for allocating claims.

2. China and Vietnam assert more than the customary continental shelf. 

Vietnam’s claim reaches past a conventional, internationally exclusive economic zone 200-nautical mile (370-km) from its Indochinese coastline into the Spratly archipelago, among other places. 

Its military units occupy the group’s largest feature, Spratly Island. 

Claimants Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines normally operate within 200 nautical miles of their shores. 

China claims nearly the whole resource-rich sea.

3. Both countries are reclaiming land for military use. 

China has landfilled about 3,200 acres (1,294 hectares) of land to beef up tiny, partly submerged islets. 

It’s got surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island in the Paracel chain, to cite one example. 

Vietnam has landfilled 27 islets, more than any other claimant. 

It is investing now in the extension of Spratly Island’s runway from 2,500 to 3,300 meters, ideal for landing air force maritime surveillance aircraft, and building hangars, the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies says. 

“Vietnam is the only other country there that has overlapping claims with China,” says Carl Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 

“They both claim everything essentially. It’s also the only other country to engage in such a robust defense modernization.”

4. Nationalist crowds at home. 

The Communist governments of China and Vietnam must please home audiences with a keen sense of nationalism, including a deep historic resentment in Vietnam against the Chinese. 

The two sides talk of cooperation to avoid a nationalistic spillover such as the anti-China riots in Vietnam in 2014. 

But each uses is state-controlled mass media to remind an eager public of its claims. 

Local media cover Vietnamese island reclamation work to stoke excitement, for example, says Mekong Economics chief economist Adam McCarty.

5. Neither side is afraid of a fight. 

Scores died in 1974, and again in 1988, when Chinese and Vietnamese vessels clashed in the South China Sea. 

Most of the dead were Vietnamese sailors. 

In 2014, vessels from both sides rammed each other after Beijing let the Chinese offshore oil driller position a rig in the disputed Gulf of Tonkin. 

Now Vietnam is preparing for any new fights by accepting maritime patrol boats from Japan and military aid of $18 million from the United States.

Sina Delenda Est

As Trump prepares for office, concerns about China’s unfair trade and investment practices intensify
By Simon Denyer

A Chinese laboorer works at an unauthorized steel factory, foreground, on Nov. 4, 2016, in Inner Mongolia, China. 

BEIJING — Around the world, concerns are mounting about China’s unfair trade and investment practices. 

How Donald Trump responds could have a far-reaching impact on the global economy and financial markets.
Trump has threatened to declare China a currency manipulator, but experts say he has little legal or economic basis to take such a step. 

He has also threatened to impose a tariff of up to 45 percent on Chinese imports if Beijing doesn’t “behave,” a move that could lead to a trade war and damage the economies of both nations.
Yet he is not alone in sounding the alarm about unfair competition and a playing field sharply tilted in China’s favor. 

And there are plenty of options on the table if he wants to show he is tougher than his predecessor.
The American Chamber of Commerce in China, which usually is very measured in any criticism of China, complained this month about a rise in Chinese protectionism and “economic hegemony,” with doors closing to foreign investment, regulations biased against foreign companies, and new national security-related laws breeding “distrust and paranoia.”
The United States “needs to raise its game with the Chinese to drive for a sense of urgency” in dealing with these issues, it said.
But it is not just the treatment of foreign companies in China, and their lack of access to the Chinese market, that has raised tensions.
Chinese companies are also engaged in a state-sponsored buying spree of foreign companies, diplomats and experts say, in sectors identified by the government as key to an industrial modernization strategy known as Made in China 2025.
China has been using the state’s vast financial resources to buy up key foreign innovation and technology, often in sectors where the Chinese economy is largely closed to inward investment.
So as U.S. investment into China slowly declines, Chinese investment into the United States has surged, overtaking money going the other way for the first time in 2015, according to a new report by the Rhodium Group, an economic research consulting firm.
It is a similar story in Europe. 

Trade tensions between China and Germany have ratcheted up this year.
Ambassador Michael Clauss talks of an “unprecedented wave” of complaints by German companies about the problems of doing business here, and a “definite rise in protectionism” — at the same time as China pours billions of dollars into buying German firms, including several of its most innovative high-tech companies.
That has raised deep concerns in Berlin about national security and Germany’s ability to innovate in the future.
“This is not just an American problem,” Clauss said. 

“China has to realize these concerns are real.”
In Washington this month, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended changing U.S. law to bar state-owned Chinese companies from buying American businesses.
“We don’t want the U.S. government owning large chunks of the U.S. economy, so why do we want the Chinese Communist Party owning large chunks of the U.S. economy?” asked Dennis Shea, the Republican chairman of the bipartisan commission.
So what are Trump’s options?
To judge China a currency manipulator under U.S. law, the Treasury Department would have to determine that it runs a “significant” bilateral trade surplus with the United States, a “material” current account surplus, and is “engaged in persistent one-sided intervention in the foreign exchange market.”
Although China has by far the largest trade surplus with the United States of any country — $356 billion in 2015 — its current account surplus is under 3 percent of gross domestic product, and it has actually been intervening to prop up its currency, not depress its value.
In other words, it met only one of the three criteria last year, the Treasury Department reported. 

“It would be difficult for the new administration to direct the Treasury to say China is a currency manipulator,” said Eric Shimp, a policy adviser at Alston & Bird in Washington, and a former U.S. diplomat and trade negotiator.
Still, Shimp said, a Trump administration could initiate a broader investigation into China’s trade practices and the state subsidies Chinese exporters enjoy.
Across-the-board punitive tariffs are unlikely, not least because they would invite likely Chinese retaliation that could bring down entire industries, experts said. 

But specific measures are possible in specific industries.
In Washington last week, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said that problems in the trade relationship could damage the global economic recovery and that cooperation was “the only right choice.”
Chinese media have warned of canceled orders for Boeing aircraft, depressed iPhone sales and halted corn and soybean imports if a trade war erupted.
Nevertheless, Trump will be looking closely at the steel industry, especially with Dan DiMicco, former chief executive of the steel company Nucor, leading his transition team at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office.
The Obama administration has already imposed heavy anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on some types of Chinese steel, but Shimp said broader tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports might be considered under U.S. “global safeguard” rules — if a Trump administration decides that rising imports have caused “serious” economic injury.
“The harm to global industry from China’s excess capacity in steel and aluminum are well known,” said Claire Reade, senior counsel at Arnold & Porter in Washington and former assistant U.S. trade representative for China. 

“If Trump took action to curb this injury, China would not find itself holding the moral high ground in international public opinion. This might temper any reaction.”
Similarly, a blanket ban on investment by Chinese state-owned companies appears unlikely, experts say. 

The Rhodium Group said Chinese firms employ more than 100,000 people in the United States, and experts say there is still an appetite for investment that rescues indebted companies, builds infrastructure and creates jobs.
But experts expect greater scrutiny of who is behind the deals and where the money is coming from.
Trump prides himself on being the consummate dealmaker, and whether his dire warnings were a negotiating tactic remains in question.
“You’ve thrown out the bomb on tariffs, now let’s use that as leverage,” said Christopher Balding, an associate professor at the HSBC Business School in Shenzhen, China.
But there are risks. 

For one, it is far from certain that China will agree to the sort of demands Trump might make: strengthening big state-owned companies is central to its current economic strategy.
The temptation for Trump to show his supporters that he is standing up to China, and Beijing’s desire to stand strong, means that some kind of action-reaction sequence is entirely possible. 

Vietnam Taking Long-Term Hard Line Toward China on Maritime Claims

By Ralph Jennings

 A Vietnamese floating guard station is seen on Truong Sa islands, or Spratly island.
TAIPEI — Vietnam is lengthening a military runway on a tiny islet to help hold off a larger, more aggressive China for control in Asia’s widest-reaching sovereignty dispute as other claimants keep quiet or seek negotiations.
The government in Hanoi is extending the runway on one of the Spratly Islands, a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea, from 762 to 1,005 meters and building new hangars, according to the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The longer runway would allow easier access for the air force’s maritime surveillance aircraft, it said.
Historic use of the sea, strong national pride and a history of deadly conflicts are motivating Vietnam to fortify more than two dozen islands in the chain.
“The Vietnamese have to play a very careful game,” said Adam McCarty, chief economist at Mekong Economics in Hanoi. 

“They don’t really want to provoke China, but they also can’t just let China do whatever it wants to do.
China has also irritated Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines since 2010 with its quick expansion into the 3.5-million-square-km (1.4 million-square-mile) ocean.

Standing up to China
But other governments normally keep quiet when China passes ships through their maritime zones. Malaysia, for one, hopes to protect its extensive trade and investment relations with the world number two economy, while Brunei is also quiet.
The Philippines, once hostile enough to take the maritime dispute to a world arbitration court, began making peace with China in August. 

The two sides may now explore jointly for undersea fossil fuels.
Vietnam has already done landfill work on 27 South China Sea islets, more than any other claimant, though China’s land reclamation is grabbing more headlines.
Vietnam has also acquired submarines and spent heavily on military expansion over the past eight years, analysts note.

Unique cause for concern
Vietnam is uniquely wary of China for historical reasons, analysts say. 

The two sides fought a border war in 1979 and have reported three major clashes at sea. 

An incident in the Paracel Islands in 1974 sank a South Vietnamese navy ship with the captain on board, killing a total 71 from both sides. 

A 1988 naval battle left 64 Vietnamese dead.
From 1992 to 1996, Vietnam staved off China’s efforts to explore some of the sea’s islets, but China has taken an upper hand since then despite a 2007 plan in Vietnam to link maritime resources to its coastal economic development.
Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen around Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the U.S. Navy, May 21, 2015.

Two years ago Vietnamese and Chinese vessels rammed each other in the Gulf of Tonkin after China allowed an offshore oil driller to position a rig in overlapping waters. 

The oil rig incident sparked anti-China riots in Vietnam and left 21 dead. 

Vietnam protested a Chinese rig using the same waters in April.
“I think, number one, they have very unfortunately experienced in the past that they have had actual military confrontation with China in terms of protecting their maritime interests,” said Andrew Yang, secretary general with the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies think tank in Taiwan.

Historic claims
Vietnamese people have used the South China Sea for hundreds of years, stoking the nationalism behind today’s dispute with China. 

Before North and South Vietnam were unified in the 1970s, the south maintained military and civilian communities in the Spratlys. 

Its claims to the ocean now also overlap with Malaysia and the Philippines.
“The Vietnamese leadership still has to be very sensitive and responsive to what the Vietnamese people really feel and want,” he said. 

“There’s a strong anti-China sentiment and there’s very strong nationalism in Vietnam, so they have to be seen to be pushing back against China but at the same time they realize you can’t poke the bear too often or you get a really bad backlash.”
Vietnamese officials once believed the South China Sea to hold oil and natural gas reserves off their south coast, McCarty said, but they eased away due to the cost of exploration. 

The country is not “sophisticated” in deep-sea fishing, another common economic reason countries cite for their interest in the South China Sea, he said.
As China builds up tiny disputed islets with the capability of launching planes, Vietnam fears its claims will be harder to defend, McCarty said.

Hanoi seeks peace with Beijing
Still, the country counts China as its top supplier of raw material for a fast-growing manufacturing sector. 

China is also Vietnam's top trading partner.
The Communist government in Hanoi squelched the 2014 riots in part to keep peace with Beijing. 

In September, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc pledged to manage their differences over maritime issues.
At the same time, Vietnam is pursuing closer security ties with Japan, India and the United States as a bulwark against China.
“They’ve gone much further than Malaysia and much, much further than the Philippines to be able to represent a deterrent [to China],” said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at The University of New South Wales in Australia.
In May the U.S. government lifted a 30-year-old embargo against selling lethal weapons to Vietnam and separately it has offered $18 million in military aid. 

Japan is also sending maritime patrol boats to Vietnam.
China prefers two-way talks with rival maritime claimants to solve disputes and has lashed out at the United States for intervention.
“Vietnam had long been negotiating bilaterally with China, but Vietnam is different in saying that where third party interests are involved, then they have a right to be involved,” Thayer said.

China Battles For Internet Hegemony After America Gives Up Control

With its foreboding history of censorship and lack of regard for free speech rights, China having a degree of control over the Internet is a unsettling prospect.

By Eric Lieberman

Powerful countries that don’t cherish or respect freedom of speech seem to be jockeying for influence over Internet governance after Barack Obama’s administration allowed a contract with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), an American corporation, to expire Oct. 1.
Under Obama’s leadership, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) transitioned stewardship of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) to a global entity. 

DNS is the technical network that converts website address names into numbers, in essence, the “yellow pages” of web addresses.
Now Xi Jinping appears to be pushing for leverage.
“The development of the Internet has posed new challenges to national sovereignty, security and development interests,” Xi said in a letter for the 1st World Internet Conference in 2014.
“The development of the Internet knows no international boundaries. The sound use, development and governance of the Internet thus calls for closer cooperation,” Xi said at the 3rd World Internet Conference roughly a week ago, according to Reuters.
Xi spoke in general of different states respecting one another’s “cyber sovereignty.”
Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief and member of the Communist Party’s leading Politburo Standing Committee, also stressed that different countries must focus on congruence.
“There can’t be national security for one country while there is insecurity in another. (Countries) can’t seek their own so-called ‘absolute security’ while sacrificing the security of another country,” Liu told Reuters.
With its foreboding history of censorship and lack of regard for free speech rights, China having a degree of control over the Internet is a unsettling prospect.
When it comes to Internet governance, China prioritizes national sovereignty, social order and national security first — not freedom of speech like the U.S. Constitution promises and protects, as Xi explained at the 2nd World Internet Conference.
Out of 65 analyzed countries, China was ranked the worst abuser of Internet freedom in 2016, according to a recent report released by Freedom House, a nonprofit research institute.
“The Chinese government’s crackdown on free expression under Xi Jinping’s ‘information security’ policy is taking its toll on the digital activists who have traditionally fought back against censorship and surveillance,” the official assessment reads.
China will have an inherently big seat at the table during the “multi-stakeholder” processes organized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the organization that delves out the contracts for DNS control.
And China isn’t the only powerful country with a poor record of protecting Internet freedom to likely have influence.
Russia recently blocked the social networking website LinkedIn because the company did not handover the private data of users within the country. 

Russia is ranked 52nd in Freedom House’s evaluation.
Andrey Bubeyev, a mechanical engineer, was sentenced to two years in prison in May for publishing content that depicted the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula as part of Ukraine on a social network site, according to the Freedom House report, which lists a number of other state-imposed punishments that are disproportionate relative to other nations.
“Trade sanctions against countries that censor websites, like Russia, could be a useful tool,” Shane Tews, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy, told The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF).
Tews, though, highlighted the importance of trying to keep politics and technical functions separate.
“Only by committing to the separation of architecture and politics can we shield the Domain Name System (DNS) from being a proxy fight for other political games,” Tews explained in TechPolicyDaily.
Hopefully a strategy like this works, because as Tews stressed, there’s no way of getting the contract between ICANN and IANA back. 

“We just have to hope,” she said.
Jeff Baron is a web pioneer who owned a domain name registrar business accredited by ICANN and given responsibility to secure domain name registrations for businesses and consumers. 

His business operated DNS servers for roughly one million domain names with 50 million monthly visitors, but a judge essentially allowed ICANN to give his registry to China without his consent or any financial compensation.
In an exclusive interview with TheDCNF, Baron described why the transition is becoming even more overtly dangerous.
“Currently, a foreign government does not have the power to ubiquitously censor the Internet in the United States. That is because such censorship requires the cooperation of either the United States government or key United States companies,” Baron explained. 

“However, if a government or non-state actor were to obtain control of the Internet’s technical infrastructure, it would be able to engage in global censorship and mass propaganda, among other transgressions.”
Baron details the widespread impacts of the fast-developing international governance model on the Internet. 

“ICANN wields vast power and its policies and actions can have a dramatic impact on the exchange of information, the global economy and national security,” Baron said. 

“In the wrong hands, ICANN could be used as a weapon to dictate who has access to the Internet.”
Baron fears that if a hostile government were able to gain control of the DNS, it could disable “.gov” and “.mil” domain names, which are crucial for national security.
He also referenced the Internet’s direct influence on the news people receive, as well commercial Internet activities, which Baron says account for $5 trillion globally every year.
Fears like those voiced by Baron are not unfounded, especially after someone successfully shut down large portions of the Internet for people in Northeast America in October.
Such attacks on DNS could become a serious and constant problem for America’s Internet infrastructure now that control has essentially been “Balkanized.”
Baron is currently attempting to voice his concerns with President Donald Trump through his own Internet Freedom Project (IFP). 

The IFP is advocating a “Make the Internet American again” plank to be added to the already high-impact list of new foreign policy pledges.
If collusion and corruption with foreign actors to destroy an American Internet business like Baron’s with over 1 million domain names and 50 million unique visitors per month can occur while the Internet is ‘American,’ imagine what is possible now, 

Baron cautions, observing that “putting the Internet into the hands of a foreign-controlled body could lead to the theft of American Internet real estate and to censorship.”
“I hope President Trump realizes this and will take steps to repatriate the Internet, much like we take steps to guard our other national treasures,” Baron concludes.
As America loses influence over a large portion of the Internet, the nation’s founding principles may be less effective in protecting the free and open exchange of information online.